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First Escape Attempts & Mulligans

The players controlling both Foxfire the rogue and Gargamel the wizard were not able to make it to our second session, so we had to roll on the Escaping the Dungeon chart. This would be the first test of the system. They had a fairly accurate map and weren’t too far away from the entrance to the complex, so I gave them a 75% chance of escaping without having to roll on the Failed Escapes table. Aaaaaand… They both failed.

So then we went to roll up the results for Gargamel. He got a 2 which tells me to roll on the Lingering Injury table, DMG page 272. Doing so got him a horrible scar that gives him disadvantage on persuasion and advantage on intimidate checks. It can be healed with magical healing of sixth or higher level.

In rolling up Foxfire’s results, they couldn’t have been worse. Straight off, she died. Then her companions rolled that they didn’t know where her body was. But that didn’t matter because the roll to see whether her body was destroyed shows that it was, in fact, utterly destroyed.

So. This didn’t feel right on a few levels. One: I didn’t want to disobey the dice rolls. I am very deliberately doing any and all rolls on the table, out in the open, that will do damage to the PCs. I don’t want there to be any fudging when it comes to them taking damage. Two: this is the first character of a first time ever RPG player and she had only played once. Add to that, her reasons for not being there were real life stuff out of her control. So it didn’t feel right to utterly destroy her character right off the bat.

Thus, the mulligan rule was born. Pretty straight forward. Every character gets a do over on the Failed Escapes table.